New Cinemas from Asia Song Hwee Lim

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Editorial New cinemas from Asia Song Hwee Lim

It can be argued that the most exciting contemporary cinemas in the last 1 See Fredric Jameson decade or so have emerged from Asia. The combined forces of the three (1994), ‘Remapping Taipei’, in Nick new waves in the Chinese world – mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Browne et al. (eds), Kong – since the early 1980s have produced established masters like New Chinese Cinemas: Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Tsai Forms, Identities, Politics, Cambridge: Ming-liang, Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, as well as the new visions of Cambridge University Jiang Wen, Jia Zhangke, Liu Bingjian, Chang Cho-chi, Lin Cheng-sheng, Press. Yee Chih-yen, and Fruit Chan. Iranian cinema, led by Abbas Kiarostami and the Makhmalbaf family, revives humanism and realism with its decep- tively simple aesthetics. More recently, the booming industries of South Korea and Thailand, alongside always-thriving Bollywood, fascinate with their idiosyncratic variations on generic forms. In the Western world, scholarship has not always responded soon enough to these new cinemas, and audience reception can be described as delayed recognition. For example, Edward Yang, whose film-making career spans two decades to date, only caught wider attention with his 2000 film Yi Yi/A One and a Two, and Fredric Jameson’s article on Yang’s 1986 film The Terrorizer remains a rare discussion of Yang’s earlier works.1 Another aspect worthy of academic attention is the circulation of these cinemas within Asia itself. As early as 1993, the Taipei Golden Horse film festival featured ‘A Tribute to Abbas Kiarostami’, where the Iranian film-maker became an instant hit merely by word of mouth. That Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien apparently admire each other’s works also invites a comparative study. New Cinemas is therefore excited to present in this issue four articles on new cinemas from Asia. Babak Fozooni’s essay debunks the classification of Kiarostami as modernist and, in the process, shores up the limits of a Western, modernist framework of interpretation on cinematic works that may have drawn upon premodern influences. Yuriko Furuhata’s essay interrogates the notion of ‘resistance’ in two texts, one cinematic (the 1999 South Korean film Shiri) and the other academic (the 2000 book Empire), against the assumption embedded in ‘world systems theory’, manifesting itself as a tendency in some ‘First World(ist)’ scholarship to read ‘Third World’ cultural production primarily in the trope of resistance, the complexity of which is captured by Lydia Liu:

I find the work of postcolonial theorists very stimulating and am indebted to the interesting new ways of thinking their scholarship has opened up. At the same time, my research in modern Chinese history and literature has led me to confront phenomena and problems that cannot easily be brought under the postcolonial paradigm of Western domination and native resistance. I am struck by the irony that, in the very act of criticizing Western domination,

2 Lydia H. Liu (1995), one often ends up reifying the power of the dominator to a degree that the Translingual Practice: agency of non-Western cultures is reduced to a single possibility: resistance.2 Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity - China, Julian Ward’s essay introduces the directorial work of Jiang Wen, probably 1900–1937, best known as leading actor in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987). Unlike Stanford, CA: Stanford University his so-called Fifth Generation predecessors, Jiang is not obsessed with Press, pp. xv–xvi. attempting to portray modern Chinese history in the style of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994) or Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993). On the contrary, like his directorial debut In the Heat of the Sun (1994), Jiang displays an irreverence towards grand notions of history, and questions the efficacy of memory, also demonstrated in the film under Ward’s discussion, Devils on the Doorstep (2000). Yingjin Zhang’s article on the current state of documentary- making in China is timely in the context of what some have described as a renaissance in documentary film-making, evidenced by recent examples from The Buena Vista Social Club (1998), Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Spellbound (2002) to this year’s Super Size Me (2004) and My Architect (2004). This renaissance underscores, on the one hand, a feverish response to urgent issues to be addressed both domestically and globally and, on the other hand, as Zhang’s essay illustrates, the different impetus motivating a preference for making documentary over feature films that demands our attention and reflection.

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